Role

Personal project

Status

Private/local

Release

local — diagram canvas

Key outcome

Every on-screen claim is verified against the source repo at a pinned commit before a frame is drawn.

Stack

Python/Manim/Cited codegen

fig. 3.1 — the engine's own output. The amber tag marks the view simplified; the badge cites the source commit the "memory force" claim was verified against.

What it is

The Explainer Engine compiles a YAML storyboard into a Manim narrated scene. Each beat is a plot, a cited code callout, or — newest — an animated concept diagram: labeled nodes placed at named anchors, force edges, one path, and a node moving along it. The clip above was produced by the engine itself, end to end.

Why it cites

Explanations drift from the code they describe, and a diagram or a paraphrase is easy to get subtly wrong. So the engine refuses to draw a claim it cannot back. Before render, a citation gate reads the cited lines from the source repo at a pinned commit and checks that the stated evidence is actually present; a commit-honesty check fails the build if the badge's commit does not match the repo's HEAD, or the tree is dirty without an explicit opt-in. On screen, content is always marked simplified — a reshaped teaching view is never passed off as verbatim source. The amber tag and the verified @ commit badge are not decoration; they are the gate's verdict, rendered into the frame.

How it works

One pass, no model in the loop: storyboard (YAML) → citation gate (evidence present at cite, commit honest) → deterministic codegen (the same storyboard always emits the same scene) → Manim render with synthesized narration. The diagram canvas turns relationships into motion without hand-built scene code, which is what lets a concept — not just a code listing — be explained and still be checkable.

Evidence

The clip is the engine's output, not a mock-up. Its five forces are drawn from a research wiki; the on-screen badge cites the exact source line and commit the "memory force" claim was verified against, and the citation gate passed before the render ran. The engine sits on a shared, Qt-free render core — the same core a desktop batch-render GUI drives — so the rendering path is one tested surface, not a one-off script.

What it isn't

• Not an LLM video generator — codegen is deterministic and reproducible.
• Not a slideshow — the diagram canvas animates relationships, not bullet points.
• Not a verbatim source viewer — on-screen code is a marked simplification, with the real lines cited.
• Private/local — not a public-source project today.

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